Links 6/3/2025

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1. .Tom June 3, 2025 at 7:16 am

   > if you have not had time to get to it, listen to the opening section of this interview with Larry Wilkerson. He is incandescent about the cavalierness, as embodied in this headline, of violating critical Cold War nuclear understandings.

   Yes, I listened to it live yesterday and it wasn’t just the opening that was alarming.

   Jeffrey Sachs on Judge Nap sounded close to tears, seemingly unable to see a way that the situation doesn’t escalate from here.
   1. SomeGuyinAZ June 3, 2025 at 2:09 pm

      Wow, that was a sobering interview and responses from Col. Wilkerson.
2. The Rev Kev June 3, 2025 at 7:21 am

   “Going to an office and pretending to work: A business that’s booming in China”

   I actually think that this is a good idea. People can go looking for work in a pressure free environment, it gets their families off their backs about why they are such a failure in not getting a job straight away, and there is the opportunity to meet like minded people which can lead to friendships developing. And all for minimal money – unlike spending the day in a coffee place looking for work. Of course I am reminded of how the American method works but at least you get paid doing this-

   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTdOHBIppx8 (2:32 mins)
   1. curlydan June 3, 2025 at 11:45 am

      It might be a good solution here in the States for struggling companies like WeWork. Just start a new off-shoot: We Don’t Work. It could help the office vacancy rates, too.
3. Colonel Smithers June 3, 2025 at 7:25 am

   Thank you, Yves.

   With regard to the FT warning about private credit, a Freedom of Information Act request for the Bank of England minutes where the then governor and now Canadian PM Mark Carney pushed back on oversight of such funds and intermediaries is in order. Either that or an official leaks it.

   I will ask my friends at the FT to investigate.
4. Bugs June 3, 2025 at 7:36 am

   “How Britain’s biggest companies are preparing for a Third World War”

   The headline’s now been changed to “Britain’s biggest companies are preparing for a Third World War”, url remaining unchanged.

   In any case, I knew that the answer would be “by hiring consulting firms”.
   1. DJG, Reality Czar June 3, 2025 at 9:04 am

      Bugs: I wasn’t going to read the article, because England is already proving that the skits in Monty Python’s Flying Circus were naturalistic drama. And here, all these years, I thought that they were satire and slapstick.

      Yet this article and the notes on Poland indicate to me that we are not dealing with serious men and women:
      From the consultants for WWIII at the Telegraph: ‘In a scenario where Britain becomes involved in a war itself, Crump says employers may also suddenly find themselves with gaps in their workforces. He believes things would need to get “very bad indeed” for the Government to impose conscription, which applied to men aged 18-41 during the Second World War.’

      You don’t say. Let’s see. Death puts a dent in one’s human resources, yet one still has to have a functioning army, instead of a bunch of dumpy Americans hanging out at their base at the contracted Taco Bell. Conscript them all, I say: Boys and girls.

      Then, the news from Poland, which is always in its own twilight zone between fanaticism and nationalism: “Tusk was poised to make Poland powerful again on the European stage — just six months ago, he was the most potent player in the revived Weimar Triangle. Now, he’s among the EU’s walking wounded, and mainstream Brussels has lost a role model for how to counter populism.”

      Weimar? Why does that town’s name seem vaguely foreboding? And the Weimar Triangle would now be Merz, Tusk, and Macron.

      There is a Three Stooges joke in there, for those of us of a certain age.
   2. Kouros June 3, 2025 at 11:40 am

      Of course, given that “Sir Keir Starmer has been urged to dramatically cut factory energy costs amid warnings huge bills are pushing Britain towards “de-industrialisation””. Consultants will compensate a fraction of the loss with the hot air they will be producing.
5. Unironic Pangloss June 3, 2025 at 7:44 am

   >>> A.I. Killed the Math Brain

   There is a 1978 “Buck Rogers” episode, “Vegas in Space,” where ex-20th century astronaut Buck goes to 25th-century Space Vegas of a James Bond-style mission.

   Buck wins lots of money because in the future, people are so bad at head math that they can’t even do the mental work for blackjack,

   I guess in 1977 those TI calculators and HP calculator-computers were the start of the slippery slope, lol
   1. Trees&Trunks June 3, 2025 at 8:13 am

      Is there anybody in the commenrariat with kids? If so, please, share what you are doing to avoid brain rot of your kids.

      I refuse any iphone or ipad. Minimze TV. When TV moslty fact-stuff.
      1. The Rev Kev June 3, 2025 at 8:22 am

         Too late! My daughter accidentally super-glued her mobile to her hand many years ago. At least I never see her without it.
      2. Terry Flynn June 3, 2025 at 8:25 am

         I most defiitely have no kids…BUT I find it interesting to compare different approaches to parenting by a family member compared to an old friend. Both have non-identical twin children in mid teens (in fact almost exact same age).

         The family member allowed unlimited use of electronic stuff. The friend used the “x hours per day of computer use” function and demanded the kids engage in outside stuff too (scouts, team stuff which didn’t need to be sports, whatever the kid(s) had desire to do, that kind of thing.) Interestingly, one “non singleton electronic” task allowed was “attend coding lessons”.

         I’ll be interested to see how they’ve done in 10 years (assuming we haven’t nuked ourselves by then). All four children currently show some great traits but in very different ways.
      3. Unironic Pangloss June 3, 2025 at 8:39 am

         it’s like spitting into a hurricane (whether at school or not).

         it’s more about being pro-X (sports, music, dance, hiking, etc.) than anti-screen.

         1. try no screens before 3 as in I would go to another room rather than teach the kids a screen exists…in my hypothesis ages 0 – 3.5 is when the most permanent damage gets done

         2. when they use they computer/tablet, i just sit next to them…read, clean, ask about what they are watching; to spy and to at make screen-time bi-drectional.

         3. some apps are just awful. …even PBS Kids.

         4. no music or radio in the car. we talk, or kids gotta talk to their inner monologue, lol

         just experiment. no right answer. kids have to be mentally bi-directional with their surroundings; eyes in front of screen just being a sponge is the worst (see old folks and TVs). stopping the screen dopamine-hit at ages 0 to 3 is critical!
         1. curlydan June 3, 2025 at 11:57 am

            I agree that hobbies are important. My older teens are screen addicts…maybe I am, too. But they have hobbies like rock climbing, soccer, car repair, and hiking that at least gets them off the screens for a bit. My older son has even been caught reading a handful of novels/books in the past year!

            I still think writing needs to be emphasized more in school–sounds like in school writing on pen and paper is the way to go.
      4. Unironic Pangloss June 3, 2025 at 9:00 am

         cross your fingers that your school district is pro-paleo learning. my kids were issued chalk and a mini-chalkboard in kindergarden (public school).

         my friend’s kindergarteners (public school) were issued their own Chromebook
      5. Revenant June 3, 2025 at 9:28 am

         Our kids have devices, sadly.

         We have to read to them still, at 10 and 13. Dracula, A Wizard of Earthsea, Frankenstein etc. Son #1 is dyslexic and reads nothing otherwise. Son #2 is not much keener on reading, devices are easier. But they clearly watch a lot of interesting videos, they are always coming out with facts.

         We try to give them puzzles and they both find brainteasers and logic puzzles on YouTube. Their grandfather is a maths teacher and does maths with them whenever they are together.

         Mostly I make them solve things in their head. Converting recipes, estimating outcomes, extrapolating situations. And if they ask a question – they ask a lot of weird questions, trying to optimise decisions in video games – I never give them the answer but reframe it to lead them to the logic of solving or estimating it.

         But this is quite frustrating for them and I am unusually heartless as well as good at mental arithmetic and enjoy the brain exercise so this Socratic process is not for everybody!

         Interestingly, son #1 in particular sees areas of maths in a very different way to me. Some of his insights and autodidact calculation methods are bizarre but also powerful. I think the dyslexia is at work here….
      6. Antagonist June 3, 2025 at 12:34 pm

         Let’s not get all “Get off my lawn, you crazy kids with your phone induced brain rot!” I don’t have children, but I do have parents who are experiencing age related cognitive decline, which has been exacerbated by excessive phone use. I considered if my parents are suffering dementia, and I concluded that they are not: they are just plain stupid. My mom, in particular, has zero interests and hobbies. She has always been a very gossipy sedentary person who refuses to exercise, read, write, study, plan, and learn. The iphone afforded her the opportunity to gossip via a never-ending number of text messages, photo and video shares, and voice calls without additional charges for long distance. Her doctors and I believe it is abundantly clear that she suffers severe anxiety. I surmise she might be clinically depressed too, and a major reason for this her addiction to gossiping via phones.
      7. IM Doc June 3, 2025 at 12:53 pm

         We live in an area where there are tech people all around working from home. In one of the more fascinating twists in life, all of these tech parents, every single one, refuse to have their kids using any kind of tech – no videogames no phones no computers, etc. ( My wife and I often ask one another out loud after witnessing the anti-tech crusading of the tech employees – “Is there something we are not being told?”) So, thankfully, at least for now, there is enormous peer pressure to not do tech.

         The wife and I refuse to touch our computers or phones anywhere around the kids. This is certainly the case in public. I want my kids to remember me 50 years from now out in the greenhouses or with a book in hand. I do not want them remembering me ignoring them their entire childhood.

         Summer just started. Their job is to play outdoors as much as possible – they have lots of work to do – they are involved in all kinds of sports. We check out a dozen or two books from the library every weekend – and every day – they are asked to summarize their reading around the dinner table, and write book reports. We will be as a family watching 13 Shakespeare plays/movies, one per week this summer, and we do not have the TV on at all for anything other than family-time shows or documentaries.

         They seem to thrive in this. It is similar for all the other kids around. And mine have never known anything different. But it is a constant consuming battle every minute of every day.
         1. alrhundi June 3, 2025 at 4:08 pm

            Your first paragraph reminds me of the documentary “The Social Network”. It talks about how the creators/executives of all these popular tech companies dont allow their kids to use social media because they understand how it’s built to prey on your attention.
   2. JMH June 3, 2025 at 8:45 am

      The math brain was already terminal. I grew up long before calculators and computers and surrounded by adults who were comfortable with “head math.” I taught math, arithmetic, in the 1960s and algebra in later years. The decline in a firm grasp on basic math was linear at first and then verged on geometric. Calculators had a great deal to do with it, but the pedagogical nonsense that relaxed the insistence that children master basic math in the early grades was the kiss of death.
      1. Unironic Pangloss June 3, 2025 at 9:23 am

         I see that and it’s shocking. rudimentary things like: asking some preschoolers (kindergarteners to) sum 2 + 2 (4 + 7). they look at me like i’m speaking Klingonese
         1. The Rev Kev June 3, 2025 at 9:44 am

            Sometimes when I am at a supermarket checkout and they say that the bill is $20.20, I will hand them $25.20 and see how many get it straight away.
            1. vao June 3, 2025 at 10:08 am

               I do that systematically, and meet with stupefied cashiers only rarely. It looks as if:

               1) In most supermarkets, “advanced” teller machines are in place that immediately compute the change. No need for the cashier to perform mental calculations.

               2) In the small shops with simpler, older machines, employees are forced to compute the difference anyway, so they are quite adept at it.
            2. BrianC - PDX June 3, 2025 at 11:58 am

               Money, and making change! A favorite subject. I do the same thing. Have been for years. Part of the reason is that I pay for groceries with cash. So I have a large zippered wallet with the budget for the month. The receipt and change go into the bag after the transaction. So I always have a bunch of loose coins rattling around in the bag.

               So anyway… couple of decades ago, I am in line and purchase $16.73 (or thereabouts) of stuff. I count out 73 cents and hand the young cashier the 73 cents along with a $20, a $5 and a $1. So $26.73 total. As I hand the bills over, she says: “Sir, you are paying too much.” Evidently she is new and is being trained. The older gentleman standing next to her, who I recognize as a supervisor, from buying at this store for years, quickly says: “Just take his money, I’ll explain later.”

               So she counts the change and the terminal shows $10 to be returned for change. I get the change and the receipt and walk forward a bit to get out of the way of the next customer.

               While I’m putting the $10 into the bag along with the receipt, I hear the rest of the conversation.

               Her – “Why did he pay too much?”
               Him – “It’s these old guys, they often overpay, but if you try to correct them to save them money, they get mad and argue.”
               Him – “So when you get a guy like that, don’t argue, just take their money.”
               Her – “Ok!”

               It is very rare to see a cashier that knows how to actually count change back to you. If I see it I’ll compliment them on that skill.
               1. PhilKinTN June 3, 2025 at 2:19 pm

                  Newer cash registers these days tell the cashier how to make change. If the change is $27.27, the screen displays:

                  One $20 bill
                  One $5 bill
                  Two $1 bills
                  One Quarter
                  Two Pennies
      2. Wukchumni June 3, 2025 at 9:48 am

         Full Disclosure: Learned the multiplication tables in the first grade, wow’ed ’em!

         It isn’t just math that Johnny and Co. can’t perform, ask any teenager to young adult to write something out on paper without the aid of spell check, oh my gosh~
         1. albrt June 3, 2025 at 10:20 am

            I never actually learned the multiplication tables, even though I grew up in schools that required and tested the ability to spit back answers. I came up with alternate algorithms such as “9 times X is 10 times X minus X,” which I could do quickly enough to get away with it. The only one I ever memorized was seven times eight, because I just couldn’t think of a workaround that was easier than memorizing.
            1. Wukchumni June 3, 2025 at 10:27 am

               That is precisely what is missing from our troubled math youth, rote memorization.

               It only worked for humans over the last 70,000 years~
            2. juno mas June 3, 2025 at 6:11 pm

               …but you’re still using mathematics (and the rule of multiplication). You’ve simply made the multiplication (and the subtraction) simpler for yourself.

               Believe it or not, that is what Algebra does; allows the manipulation of a numerical problem into a more recognizable (simplified) generalized form.
         2. The Rev Kev June 3, 2025 at 10:21 am

            ‘Learned the multiplication tables in the first grade, wow’ed ’em!’

            How many college freshmen can do that these days? When I am finally buried, on my tombstone will be “9 x 9 = 81”. Over half a century ago in Mr. Gordon’s 5th class, he would flick out questions like that. I got caught short one day when he asked me and so had to write it out a coupla hundred times so that I would remember it next time. Must have worked as I never forgot it and it has proved of use from time to time since.
      3. gk June 3, 2025 at 12:20 pm

         In the UK the rot started in February 1971. Before that, we did lots of exercises in school on converting guineas into pounds etc.
      4. Antifa June 3, 2025 at 1:51 pm

         Surely all of this will be solved when Americans of every age begin to use the metric system, which should be just about any ol’ time now . . .

         Mentally converting Fairyheights to Sisyphus, ounces to grams, and dozens into ten’s and hunnerds will prove too taxing for the average exceptional American, and they will quickly move on to the global standard set during the French Revolution.

         Or someone will write an app for that.
         1. scott s. June 3, 2025 at 3:28 pm

            The beauty of the imperial system is its reliance on fractional units, in particular order of 2. I guess you can think of a third of a meter, but it doesn’t seem the same as the foot-yard relation.
            1. Terry Flynn June 3, 2025 at 4:10 pm

               WTAF. We in UK only made the change halfway so we get ridiculous quotes about miles per gallon (km per litre but we use both so we get a stupid mix).

               Imperial is demonstrably stupid given the non standard multiplicative units. (Order of 2? What?). What about all those people who moaned about decimalisation in 1970s and within months we’re fine and having problems thinking about old money

               FFS.
               1. The Rev Kev June 3, 2025 at 7:16 pm

                  We switched over to decimal currency back in 1966 and I sometimes still have night sweats dreaming of having to do addition of pounds, shillings and pence.
                  1. Wukchumni June 3, 2025 at 7:29 pm

                     We switched to decimal currency in 1793…
                     1. duckies June 4, 2025 at 6:48 am

                        We switched to decimal in 211 BC. :)
      5. Kevin Smith June 3, 2025 at 4:46 pm

         About 40 years ago while working as a laborer on pipeline construction I made [and saved] a lot of money. A friend with a lot of experience told me that I wouldn’t want to be a pipeliner when I was fifty.

         I decided to use my money to go to medical school. A friend, a few years ahead of me and in med school, told me that pre-med was all math, all day, every day. “If you’re not good at math, you won’t make it.”

         So in August I went to the department of Science and asked for the names of some good math tutors. Well, God bless my tutor! I would do every question at the end of every chapter in all my textbooks, and would get stumped at least several times a week. Went over to have tea with my tutor, and she got me straightened out and back on the right path. If I could find her now, I’d sure let her know what difference she made.

         Anyway, I wound up winning the gold medal for science, did great in med school and derm residency. Having developed a good head for math, and a feel for math, I had a great competitive advantage.
   3. Bsn June 3, 2025 at 10:15 am

      I taught middle and high school for 20+ years. I had 4 “feeder schools”, schools in our region that moved up into my mid and high schools. One of the feeders was a “hippy dippy” school: no phones, lots of outdoor school (in the woods and desert), no smartboards in the class, pen and paper – you get the idea. Those students graduated up to me with superior behavior, dexterity, ability to use hand tools (I never had to say “lefty loosy – righty tighty”) and overall math abilities. The most interesting was when they were done with a test, often before the other students, they would turn their paper over and draw interesting pictures. That is a good sigh that boredom, which often leads to poor behavior, was not part of their world.
      Pretty clear in my mind about how to raise a child.
      My observational study was about n = 6,000
      1. Unironic Pangloss June 3, 2025 at 11:54 am

         if I was a education-despot, I’d make my a
         schools adopt paleo Montessori pedagogy. (multi-age classes, outdoors stuff with the occasional “Tiger Mom” boot camp drills).

         “montessori-ism” has morphed into a cash-grab designer bag…all about $$$ bespoke stuff and not learning
   4. Kouros June 3, 2025 at 11:44 am

      My teenage daughter is like a viscous dog. Untamable, untrainable, at least not by her parents. She is absolutely feral and disdains school. Most of the kids are bellow average, at least in school matters. I have a very strong inkling that teachers are also subpar.

      But there is always some hope. The inteligence blueprint, if it is there, cannot be easily erased, and will try to find a way out… But the biomass will tend to stay just biomass…
   5. Jason Boxman June 3, 2025 at 4:31 pm

      From Teachers Are Not OK

      When the final projects came in, my co-instructor and I were underwhelmed, to say the least. When I started digging into the projects, I realized that the students had used AI in some incredibly irresponsible ways—shallow, misleading, and inaccurate analysis of data, pointless and meaningless visualizations. The real kicker, though, was that we got two projects where the students had submitted a “podcast.” What they had done, apparently, was give their paper (which already had extremely flawed AI-based data analysis) to a gen AI tool and asked it to create an audio podcast. And the results were predictably awful. Full of random meaningless vocalizations at bizarre times, the “female” character was incredibly dumb and vapid (sounded like the “manic pixie dream girl” trope from those awful movies), and the “analysis” in the podcast exacerbated the problems that were already in the paper, so it was even more wrong than the paper itself.

      Another thought on this — At least for adjunct professors and I imagine public school teachers, you can’t just fail kids that do this. Sooner or later, you’re likely looking for a new job.
      1. Escapee June 3, 2025 at 9:16 pm

         I retired early from my international school teaching career two years ago in China, when the govt canceled the Zero-Covid policy (still Novid). So I avoided that super-spreader tsunami.

         AI is a second contemporary educational plague, and I got out the very semester that Microsoft and Google were piloting AI assistant bots. Thank god I missed that tsunami too. I pity fellow high school history, literature, writing, and research teachers in this ugly new world.

         And it’s tragic how my generation caught the perfect wave of High American Empire prosperity and mindless, carefree fun–because we were knuckle-headed ‘teens, 20-somethings, 30-somethings oblivious to the destruction our generation was causing.
      2. albrt June 3, 2025 at 11:27 pm

         On the bright side, maybe the utter hopelessness of the situation will take us a step or two toward realizing that not everyone should be going to college. At this point we would probably do better if we went back to disincentivizing education like in pre-modern times, so only true fanatics would even try.
6. Clock Strikes 13 June 3, 2025 at 7:53 am

   Re: Mass Delusion

   The examples of mass delusion are off the charts today: The NYT dreams up a dreamy article about Ukraine still being in the game that’s so dreamy it took 5 professional dreamers to write it. How does the fact that Russia has 7,000 nuclear devices and could end Ukraine in a heartbeat not enter their minds?

   Sweden is a formidable power in the Baltic again. I actually laughed out loud. 1, that’s ONE, nuclear device exploding over Stockholm would send Sweden to the graveyard of history along with Charles XII and the sailing ship Vasa. Given how morose Swedes are, this might actually be their plan to just euthanise the whole country and give in to their necrotic fantasies.

   A large minority of Germans still support Israel’s Genocide. Germans are so fcked up I would need a book to explain it. They basically never de-nazified, are partial to mass psychosis and see that Zionism + National Socialism is the winning combination. They are both European ethno-nationalist Blut und Boden chosen people ideologies.

   Who ever thought that der Untergang des Abendlandes would be so idiotic?
   1. Afro June 3, 2025 at 8:09 am

      Nuclear weapons, ironically, are effectively a defensive weapon. They protect a land from the use of nuclear weapons, they’re a deterrent.

      But the probability of Russia hitting Sweden or Ukraine is very low, I think that it doesn’t fact into conventional war calculations.
      1. hk June 4, 2025 at 3:01 pm

         Nuclear weapons are a defensive weapon b/c the other side thinks you’ll hit them back with those if thibgs go south. They become useless if they think they found a way to hit you without any risk of you hitting them back.

         On that note, though, Sweden is too small a fish in NATO–no point in hitting them. The only goldilocks targets are France, Germany, and UK–important enough to “matter,” but not important enough to make a general nuclear war a certainty.
   2. Unironic Pangloss June 3, 2025 at 8:27 am

      >>>> basically never de-nazified
      worse 1945 Germany infected the USA with its institutional, rabid anti-Slavism…turning an existing, but manageable, leeriness to Occidentalism (no worse than that of Italians, lol).into “The Russians are coming” mass delusion

      See Reinhard Gehlan. or this 8 min. video essay on Werner VanBraun, ever wonder what it was like for “a clean German” to explain in a Disney 35mm film the basics of rocketry?

      https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oQS-QrFXw50
      1. Bsn June 3, 2025 at 10:33 am

         Thanks for the link, a good reminder. Funny how it ends with Musk’s Nazi salute. They should have used Corey Booker’s Nazi salute to be more inclusive> Here
         1. Procopius June 5, 2025 at 1:40 am

            I’m sorry, but that wasn’t a Nazi salute. He put his hand on his heart and then moved it forward and to the side, spreading his love for everybody. I find it nearly as offensive as a Nazi salute would have been, and it doesn’t lessen my dislike of Musk, but I was alive during World War II and have strong feelings about Nazi salutes.
   3. Terry Flynn June 3, 2025 at 11:00 am

      I would describe Sweden as “profoundly quirky” rather than morose (a term which carries quite a lot of baggage). I’ve lived there along with 2 other OECD countries: all have their pros and cons. I’ve had terrible bosses but my Swedish boss was fantastic: he was unfortunately trying to “fight their system” which is very very insular and demonstrably made the medical faculty where I worked very dysfunctional with the non-Swedes (from PhD students upwards) all decide to simply quit trying to integrate and did their own group activities on weekends.

      When I got worried it was a “me” problem the deputy Director took me out for coffee and cake and said “I’m swedish born and bred. Lived in this city for 20 years and I am STILL an outsider. Unfortunately you just gotta accept that Sweden is extremely centred on family and close groups of old friends – do NOT take it personally”.

      It was just unfortunate that in the interests of “getting the best people” and constructing multi-disciplinary teams where “buggins’ turn” was no longer the rule, my boss ran into the monolithic Swedish university system which said “no!” I had tried to attend Swedish langugage classes: being a professor, I was often travelling to conferences elsewhere and missing classes. When I asked for the “homework” to catch-up they virtually laughed in my face: “turn up or fall behind”. Errrr, thanks. And they wondered why NONE of the 30+ PhD students from across the world wanted to integrate? Why we heard on local news every weekend about race riots? Sheesh. I know LOTS of countries have these kind of things going on which isn’t necessarily getting attention (UK cities, Dublin, etc) but don’t just import people to get EU cash then do nothing to help them integrate. Tends to end badly. My boss was very very ashamed when I blew up and quit on the spot after some behaviour that was,,,,well I don’t want to get anyone into trouble but would be reallllllllly unacceptable in UK/Australia. So there are lots of countries who are not doing things “right” and even have their born and bred locals shaking their heads at the boneheadedness.
   4. Krautsalat June 3, 2025 at 11:34 am

      A large minority of Germans still support Israel’s Genocide

      I don’t know what “a large minority” means for you, but in “Majority of Germans want arms exports suspended to Israel over Gaza war: Survey” it’s around 60 against:20 don’t know:20 for. So 20% is a large minority for you? What’s the share of agreement to the genocide in the US? (Couldn’t find a current poll for the US, but for Dems it’s 71:9:20 at https://zeteo.com/p/exclusive-dem-voters-overwhelming.)

      Actually it means that a lot of people are not falling for the propaganda in our media. I’m positively surprised by the numbers because every German is taught that Germans did the Holocaust and our press is always like criticizing Israel is a no go.

      And there are other polls where the numbers are even higher: 75:11:14 at https://www.stern.de/politik/deutschland/waffenexporte-nach-israel–die-meisten-deutschen-sind-dagegen-35774238.html (German)
      1. Clock Strikes 13 June 3, 2025 at 12:41 pm

         Yes. 40% of the population being for genocide or not sure if they are for it is shockingly high. When a country that has already done two genocides in its history, one of them of 17 million European civilians, has a population where only a small majority have the moral clarity required to know that genocide is evil…. that’s just beyond depraved. Sadly, the thinking that 60% of your population is not genocidal is very poor comfort given Germany’s history. Germany should never have been allowed reunify as they constantly prove that they can never be a normal country. Here we go again.
         1. Hickory June 3, 2025 at 3:03 pm

            Relax, it’s not just Germany – many European countries have committed genocide. Britain’s one of the biggest killers in history, but Germany lost the war so you hear about them more. France, Spain, Russia, the US – all show similar pathologies, though though that doesn’t mean their unaccountable leaders are equally stupid.
            1. Clock Strikes 13 June 3, 2025 at 3:16 pm

               That’s very reassuring, thank you. I’m totally relaxed now. This is fine…
            2. Lazar June 3, 2025 at 7:08 pm

               If Germany won they would be the good guys, and Slavs would be exterminated like Native Americans. Relax, Nazis would be the good guys. Being a Slav, I don’t find that relaxing at all. As a matter of fact, I find the whole survival of Nazism past 1945 to be rather disturbing, and expecially its big revival past 1991.

               If Russia was like Germany, they would have exterminated Germans, and everyone else that fough alongside them. I would say that proves not all showing similar pathologies, just like the wars we see happening just now. By some miracle Germany supports genocidal side with precision of German engineering. Who could have guessed? I did in 1991, but what do I know.
   5. Kouros June 3, 2025 at 11:48 am

      This German-Turkish professor teaching now inIstanbul and writing from time to time for RT (and his substak) Tarik has attempted to provide some explanations.
7. none June 3, 2025 at 8:01 am

   AOC article not linked and resilc comment is missing, but by web search on title, I think it is this:

   https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/06/03/here-she-comes-aoc-looks-to-defy-expectations-as-her-meteoric-rise-continues/
   1. pjay June 3, 2025 at 11:03 am

      What kind of author could write such an article?

      “Stewart Lawrence is a long-time Washington, DC-based policy consultant…”

      Oh, that explains it.

      For me the most interesting paragraph in this mainly delusional piece was this one:

      “Could a three-term congresswoman actually make it all the way to the White House? It seems unlikely, given opposition from Pelosi and other party poobahs, who generally refrain from criticizing AOC publicly. But few thought that a one-term senator from Illinois with a “funny” African name could come out of nowhere to dethrone Hillary Clinton in 2008…”

      There may be a few readers of Counterpunch left who could explain how this unknown one-term Senator with a “funny” name actually won, and for whom. Maybe she does have a shot.
      1. none June 3, 2025 at 4:50 pm

         Yeah it’s a terrible article. AOC’s “Abolish ICE” probably sounds better to lots of people now than it once did though.
   2. Yves Smith Post authorJune 3, 2025 at 1:07 pm

      Thanks, fixing….
8. GramSci June 3, 2025 at 8:10 am

   Re: Orangutans

   The proper, canonical form of the “embedded sentence” at issue is “the rat the cat the dog saw smelled ate the food”.

   George Miller was the PI on the Harvard-MIT-CIA Russian-English machine translation project when he bought Chomsky’s theory that the syntax of human language was recursive and implemented on a pushdown store architecture.

   Unfortunately, when Miller finally bothered to test humans (Miller & Isard 1964), he found that humans in fact cannot process such sentences (often even when you give them semantic clues like “chased” and “cheese”). Nevertheless, until he became my dissertation mentor some 15 years later, he persisted in the belief that the underlying mechanism was a pushdown store, but that humans operated under mysterious ‘constraints’ on that model.

   I persuaded him that the underlying model was a neural network, but I didn’t yet understand the model well enough to prevent him from adopting a spreading activation model for his
   WordNet.

   We know now that humans normally process language in a manner similar to LLMs, so the present study is an example of why we should be careful attributing ‘language’ to orangutans or ‘intelligence’ to humans.

   him straight some 15 years later,
9. Afro June 3, 2025 at 8:16 am

   The Yemeni Leader’s Meeting With Putin Should Be A Reality Check For Alt-Media Andrew Korybko.
   ********

   I think the “global South” talk may have been more convincing in the first year of the SMO. But it broke due to a lack of unity there in. China provided tremendous support to Ukraine, and neither Russia nor China gave meaningful help to the Palestinians or the Lebanese or the Houthis.

   What I guess may have happened is that they want better relations with Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, etc, notice whom they let into BRICS, and the leadership of those countries seem to prefer a strong and powerful Zionist Israel. To do business with Israel, I think that China is Israel’s largest trading partner.

   One can argue convincingly that Russia lacked the resources to save Syria. But China could have easily saved Syria. Assas fell due to a weak economy, all China had to do was lift a finger and Syria’s economy would have been a lot stronger.

   In the long term, I think that China wants joints leadership of the global North, and Russia’s fear of escalation will cause them to look weaker and weaker over time.
   1. Yves Smith Post authorJune 3, 2025 at 2:18 pm

      From what I understand, it was Syria that refused to be saved.

      Russia offered to invest in Iran. I believe there was as security component too but not a full bore defense agreement. China later offered to invest. Assad rejected both, not wanting either state to have much influence in Syria. He instead did (or at least tried to do) economic deals with the Gulf States, who could do bupkis for him militarily.

      Syria became unable to pay its military even remotely enough to live on, making it easy for them to be bribed.

      Even so, when Turkiye pushed in, they had no idea the place would fall over like a house of cards.

      No outside force can hold up a country if its own army is not doing most of the heavy lifting.
   2. Mikel June 3, 2025 at 2:27 pm

      And if none of that showed the uphill road to unity, the India vs Pakistan eruption stepped in the room and cleared its throat.
10. The Rev Kev June 3, 2025 at 8:17 am

    ‘Miss Li
    @MissQuanyi18
    Look at this, this just showed how unprepared the 🇺🇲 is 🤭
    They really had no contingency at all after all these years,
    China only agreed to suspend non-tariff countermeasures against the US, but rare earth export control was a global measure’

    For those who cannot read this interesting thread, try this one-

    https://xcancel.com/MissQuanyi18/status/1929471465763885091

    Miss Li is confirming something that I have been thinking for a while. Going into the Presidency they had the Heritage Foundation plan to pillage, err, reform America itself. But there seems to have been little thought given about the international scene so perhaps the Trump Cabinet outsourced it to the Neocons because of their reputation for brilliant plans. Otherwise? No game planning. No trying to understand America’s strengths and weaknesses. If they had done that then the subject of rare earths would have become a priority. The US military alone uses them everywhere and as an example, the F-35 uses about 920 pounds (417 kilograms) of rare earths. No more rare earths and suddenly not much modern weaponry gets built anymore. Looks like China took a leaf from America’s ‘hearts & minds’ program in Vietnam. You hold them by their nuts and their ‘hearts and minds’ will follow. So what can the US give China to get them to restore the delivery of rare earths? A bunch of promises? They have been on the receiving end of how Washington negotiates with them for many years now. What if the Chinese say to hell with it, no rare earths for you as this Miss Li suggests. Will Trump try to invade China to liberate those rare earths? Did they not think about any of their vulnerabilities to the Chinese?
    1. jsn June 3, 2025 at 11:50 am

       Yes.
       There wealth is testimony to their genius.
       They don’t have to think, they make new realities by acting! (maybe not the ones they thought they were making…)
11. Xquacy June 3, 2025 at 8:40 am

    Re: Gaza officials say Israeli forces killed 27 heading to aid site. Israel says it fired near suspects Larry Wilkerson reports that the IDF is using aid distribution to get Gazans to group so as to more easily exterminate them.

    There is excellent reporting on this.
    1. The Rev Kev June 3, 2025 at 10:10 am

       The Israelis set up a fire sac – and baited it with food.

       ‘ “Patients told [Doctors Without Borders] they were shot from all sides by drones, helicopters, boats, tanks, and Israeli soldiers on the ground,” the humanitarian medical organisation wrote in a statement, calling GHF’s system “dehumanising, dangerous and severely ineffective”.’

       https://www.newarab.com/news/calls-shut-down-ghf-grow-after-deadly-gaza-witkoff-massacre

       A Witkoff massacre indeed.
       1. hk June 3, 2025 at 12:24 pm

          Modern day Amon Goeths (the people doing the shooting that is. the higher ups are worse).
12. flora June 3, 2025 at 8:47 am

    Judge Nap and Crooke on the Ukr assault on RU. It was planned over a year ago. Last week Merz signaled the go ahead with permission to strike deep into RU. utube, ~25+ minutes.

    Alastair Crooke : A Storm is Brewing in the West.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whSuPnGWOSg
    1. Yves Smith Post authorJune 3, 2025 at 8:51 am

       The Ukrainians themselves have already said it took 18 months of planning, right after the strikes.
       1. The Rev Kev June 3, 2025 at 8:58 am

          Which brings up the question of who in the Biden regime came up with this nuclear provocation. Not Biden as we know that we was permanently out to lunch. Jake Sullivan? Antony Blinken? Mark Miley? Or maybe this was an idea suggested by the British as they are into these sorts of schemes such as the Kerch bridge bombing. Thing is, sooner or later this war will end. And when it does, Russia will still be there. So is any of the powers thinking about post-war relations with them?
          1. Bsn June 3, 2025 at 10:41 am

             And the problem is that Biden is gone now (he’s been gone quite a while actually) but his neocon (new con artists?) handlers and string pullers remain.
          2. Yves Smith Post authorJune 3, 2025 at 2:23 pm

             We don’t know if they identified the targets then, I suspect not, just the general outline of the scheme: get a lotta drones into Ukraine covertly, enough to have one to a bunch of drone swarms, and mess something important up. The “something important” was likely defined later.

             In fact, Trump (if he knew) would be less likely to act on an inherited Biden caper than one he could make more, erm, golden. Look at how Trump insisted he could better beat up on the Houthis than Biden.
       2. JohnA June 3, 2025 at 9:16 am

          With respect to this rather gloating piece in the Guardian, it would not surprise me if the British intelligence services were up to their eyeballs in helping to plan this. Bearing in mind the Guardian has been the MI6 house journal ever since the Wikileaks scoop it ran, where Guardian ‘journalists’ leaked passwords and then left Assange to twist in the wind.

          https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/02/operation-spiderweb-visual-guide-ukraine-drone-attack-russian-aircraft
          1. Bugs June 3, 2025 at 9:50 am

             Out in left field but I thought it looked like a Mossad op.
             1. jsn June 3, 2025 at 11:59 am

                Preparata’s thesis is that the Third Reich and Israel were both Montague Norman projects to implement Macinders “Heartland Theory”.

                Germany and Israel were and are both racist, settler colonial projects in the American model, itself a product of Perfidious Albion, to whom Churchill was happy to hand off the torch (once FDR was dead).
       3. bertl June 3, 2025 at 11:18 am

          I’m really uncertain about the eighteen months. I’ve been involved in situations where people have claimed that it took a year plus to achieve an outcome but they tend to start from the pre-conception moment after which nothing much happens – maybe a few meetings where several ideas are tossed around and let go. Then, under the pressure of need and time, everyone falls back on the idea, ie, pulls it out of the bin, and puts it together el quicko using whatever resources are available, so the real time taken to plan and put in place may be a week or two. But eighteen months has the authentic ring of pure PR to boost Zelensky’s stock.

          I think under the pressure of events this took 3 months tops (which fits in with Trump’s moods) and the Russians will be able to trace it back quickly via the networks they know the Yukkies use and undercover many more networks in the process. It also sounds like one of those weirdo off the wall concoctions that SIS and/or Mossad and/or the CIA are so adept at coming up with in their John Buchan information warfare moments, not least because of the operation’s logistical requirements and the proximity to international borders where customs are used to the passage of goods.
          1. Mikel June 3, 2025 at 12:48 pm

             And a full 18 months of actual operations in motion for only one day of such strikes would be baffling.
13. flora June 3, 2025 at 8:50 am

    Sigh, every comment I write goes into mod. Guess I’ll have to wait to see my last one about Ukr appears. Happy Tuesday.
    1. Bsn June 3, 2025 at 10:42 am

       Yes, happy Tuesday flora. Always appreciate your comments.
    2. BrianH June 3, 2025 at 11:57 am

       Hopefully the comments by “Bob” in yesterday’s links are not a sign of another problem for our moderators. He seemed unfamiliar with the policies.
    3. Lefty Godot June 3, 2025 at 8:41 pm

       Do your comments ever just vanish when you hit the Post button? I thought at first that was a browser problem of some kind, but after some testing I’m coming around to the idea that there is some set of filters that sends posts with certain words or concepts direct to the circular file. Maybe built into the underlying platform.
14. AG June 3, 2025 at 9:08 am

    re: Germany/war society

    recommended German interview with Ulrike Guerot by altern. news site NACHDENKSEITEN

    machine-translation:

    Ulrike Guérot: “It’s not about logic, it’s about propaganda”

    “If we believe we think freely and form our own opinions, then that’s simply not true. We have long since fallen into what Noam Chomsky called manufactured consent : the media and newspapers subtly guide our thinking where we want it to go.” Ulrike Guérot said this in an interview with NachDenkSeiten . In a discussion about her new book, “ZeitenWenden: Skizzen zur intellektuellen Situation der Gegenwart,” the political scientist addresses the war in Ukraine, denounces the narrowing of the spectrum of opinion, and says we are experiencing a “gutting of democracy.”

    By Marcus Klöckner .
    https://archive.is/OPgyN
    1. Clock Strikes 13 June 3, 2025 at 9:59 am

       I also recommend her interview with Neutrality Studies (a must-watch channel). It’s a pity she is not better known outside Germany. (Actually, it’s a pity she’s not better known inside Germany too.)

       Europe’s Terminal Decline Is Now IRREVERSIBLE | Dr. Ulrike Guérot
       1. Mikel June 3, 2025 at 2:33 pm

          Neutrality Studies also differentiates itself because Pascal has discussions with a wider variety of people across the world and includes women in a way many of the channels do not.
          1. AG June 4, 2025 at 1:33 pm

             yeah the women thing is odd in blogosphere
15. The Rev Kev June 3, 2025 at 9:12 am

    ‘Zlatti71
    @Zlatti_71
    2h
    🇷🇺⚡️ Marines of the North group of forces broke the enemy’s stubborn resistance and liberated the settlement of Andreyevka in the traditionally Russian Sumy region’

    At this point of the war, you have to wonder how many of those settlements will ever return to the Ukraine. Not many I would wager. Sumy Oblast will probably end up joining the Russian Federation.
    1. Simeon June 3, 2025 at 4:13 pm

       Ruskies are now playing for keeps.
16. The Rev Kev June 3, 2025 at 9:40 am

    “Trump’s Maximalism Fails Again”

    Trump had a solid chance to make a great deal which would have defused the whole situation, opened up Iran to the US in terms of business and ensured that Iran would never develop a nuclear weapon. It was an easy win and all he had to do was to pick it up and get a win of the board for his government. It was that easy. Instead he said this-

    ‘I want it (nuclear agreement) very strong where we can go in with inspectors, we can take whatever we want, we can blow up whatever we want, but nobody getting killed. We can blow up a lab, but nobody is gonna be in a lab, as opposed to everybody being in the lab and blowing it up.’

    https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/trumps-threat-destroy-iran-nuclear-sites-clear-red-line-fars-news-2025-05-30/

    To which any self-respecting nation would answer, ‘If you want our nuclear capability, come and take it.’
17. flora June 3, 2025 at 9:44 am

    Taibbi and Kirn. America This Week, no paywall. utube, the first hour is about the Ukr attack. ~1hr+.

    America This Week, Live on Monday 6-2-25

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BytVor20GHM
    1. flora June 3, 2025 at 11:29 am

       odd thought here: [foil bonnet on]

       Remember the so-called unexplained drone swarm flights over New Jersey and other east coast states earlier this year alarming many citizens , to the point either DoD or FFA came out and said the flights weren’t a concern? So, odd thought, were those drone swarm flights a practice run, a trial run, a shakedown cruise for this kind of tech use? Enquiring minds… [foil bonnet off] / ;)
       1. Yves Smith Post authorJune 3, 2025 at 11:41 am

          ZOMG! No I don’t think this is impossible. The entire incident was so weird that the test had to be important to a very big fish.
       2. hk June 3, 2025 at 12:21 pm

          YIkes. I hadn’t even remembered that for a long time…….
       3. Dr. John Carpenter June 3, 2025 at 2:27 pm

          Woah. i forgot this too…’tis a mystery?
       4. vao June 3, 2025 at 3:00 pm

          In the constant stream of “breaking news”, there are incidents such as this one that disappear in the memory hole — but that might indeed be crucially relevant to some other events. Yours is a very intriguing conjecture.
18. Wukchumni June 3, 2025 at 9:45 am

    Gooooooooooood Mooooooooorning Fiatnam!

    TACO Tuesday was always a treat for the platoon, we were promised steak & lobster, but obviously the guy in charge of procuring foodstuffs thought that Hamburger Helper, some leftover ground beef, wilty onions and mushy tomatoes paired well with stale hard U-shaped shells, Bon Appétit…
19. Wukchumni June 3, 2025 at 9:55 am

    O Canada!
    Your burning native land!
    True hopes of #51 patriot love teetotalitarian leader does command
    With glowing skies we see thee rise
    The out of control fires strong and free!
    From far and wide
    O Canada, we stand on guard for thee
    God keep our land smoke free!
    O Canada, we stand on guard for thee
    1. mrsyk June 3, 2025 at 11:02 am

       Who needs nukes when the world already burns.
       Good times!
    2. Kouros June 3, 2025 at 11:56 am

       They did approve just last year funding for a handful of monitoring satellites to check on the wildfire. That doesn’t mean those sats are now up and running.

       I have not seen a less proactive country than Canada. But my god, the amount of meetings and paperwork/reports that nobody in the decision chain actually reads, never mind acts is astounding.

       The 88 F-35, that now might not be delivered due to the Chinese magnets, or lack thereof will not be able to help with these fires anyway. Nor the icebreakers the US would like Canada to build/aquire for them.
       1. Wukchumni June 3, 2025 at 2:00 pm

          You have to get it just right when dropping say 500 gallons of water on a wildfire from an F-35 doing 500 knots, it isn’t the best platform for the job.

          Fire will be our sworn enemy for the rest of our lives, never taking sides in the battle aside from whatever it feels like, aided by flint columnists.
20. Nidehululi June 3, 2025 at 10:29 am

    Correct URL for ”To the ramparts! Sir Keir summons hard power for hard times John Crace, Guardian”: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/jun/02/keir-starmer-defence-review-launch-comment
21. Kurtismayfield June 3, 2025 at 10:46 am

    RE: Teachers are not OK

    All.of this is true. Next year I am.going back to basics, all paper and no electronics in the classroom. The state also may pass the no cellphone law in the classroom, because they are tired of scores sliding south. The students need to be challenged to think.
    1. Mikel June 3, 2025 at 2:03 pm

       I read that and thought about some of Ed Zitron’s articles. He’s tried to puzzle out who exactly are all these reported masses of recurring users of ChatGPT.
       I thought: Students.
       1. Kurtismayfield June 3, 2025 at 3:45 pm

          I would estimate about 30 percent are just immediately going to AI. The writing on assessments is completely different than classwork
          1. Walter June 3, 2025 at 9:38 pm

             A few months back, my older daughter was having a little trouble parsing 19th Century usage in British literature, and happened to mention it to a counselor at the college, who advised her to copy it into an AI thingum and ask it to summarize it in a more modern way. She was astonished (as was I when she told the story), and emphatically told him that that was not what she would do. She did it the hard way, and did fine in the class.
22. The Rev Kev June 3, 2025 at 10:47 am

    “America Can’t Afford to Protect Europe from Russia”

    It doesn’t want to. America’s priority is China and Europe is only secondary. You want a model for what is to come, look at the Ukraine. The Ukrainians are America’s proxy army to fight the Russians with the US supplying money, weaponry, military equipment, ammo and intel. Trump’s only gripe with this setup was that America was not making a profit from it. So now America wants to outsource fighting the Russians to the Europeans. The Europeans will be their proxy army and they will sell the Europeans the military equipment to arm it this making a profit. That is why these demands to raise NATO contributions to 5% – in order to use the extra money to buy American equipment with. America will supply the command & control and the intel but the actual forces will be mostly European, ideally under American generalship like in South Korea.
    1. Kouros June 3, 2025 at 11:58 am

       I have a question! Who’s going to build the mountain of weapons and ammunition and drones that these rivers of cash are supposed to produce?
    2. Kristiina June 3, 2025 at 12:10 pm

       US has the biggest military budget in the world, by wide margin. Has been so as long as I remember. How has it turned out on battlefields? If wars could be fought by comparing military budgets, the winner is very clear. Actual battlefield might be a different game, it will be extremely interesting how this will actually turn out in Europe, which still consists of nation-states with some security needs for themselves. How will the most expensive equipment perform – and when will it even deliver, as those rare earths seem to be difficult to get. Ukrainians departing their country to avoid getting drafted, what country will send real troops to do fighting for them?
23. diptherio June 3, 2025 at 11:19 am

    More Builder.ai shenannigans.

    AI company files for bankruptcy after being exposed as 700 Indian engineers:
    https://www.dexerto.com/entertainment/ai-company-files-for-bankruptcy-after-being-exposed-as-700-human-engineers-3208136/
    1. moog June 3, 2025 at 4:21 pm

       A Mechanical Turk on steroids.
24. communistmole June 3, 2025 at 12:21 pm

    On 3sat (a channel operated by the public broadcasters of Germany, Austria and Switzerland), yesterday the program Kulturzeit (Time for Culture) had a report on the reintroduction of conscription.

    In it, Egon Flaig, a former professor of ancient studies, spoke, who recently published an article in the FAZ (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung) entitled ‘Can democracy survive without a willingness to make sacrifices?’ (‘Kann die Demokratie ohne Opferbereitschaft überleben?‘).

    In it, he criticizes the lack of willingness to make sacrifices among today’s young people and their parents, who still believe that they live in a post-heroic world, and not in one in which the individual must once again be prepared to die for the polity.

    Therefore, he calls for the immediate reintroduction of conscription

    In a previous article, he has already criticized Ukraine for failing to declare a general mobilization in 2022, which is why 18-year-olds are now in discos and gyms instead at the front.

    This excess of civilian life has led to the undermining of the moral support of the front, which is also reflected in the increasing number of deserters

    According to Flaig, it is the responsibility of the home front to harness social energies for the political goal, namely the military self-assertion of the emerging nation, because he seems to be of the opinion that nation states are born in bloodbaths.

    Afterwards, the program brought former professional soldier and CDU-stirrer Roderich Kiesewetter, who complained that the younger generation unfortunately has no sense of threat due to all the Chinese and Russian propaganda on TikTok, which is why he believes urgent educational measures are necessary here.

    For balance, they also had an activist who runs an office for advising conscientious objectors and who is preparing for increased activities.

    As Brecht said, “Unhappy is the land that needs a hero!” (Unglücklich das Land, das Helden nötig hat!).
    1. Clock Strikes 13 June 3, 2025 at 12:54 pm

       I’d love to grab that disgusting chickenhawk Prof Flaig by the scruff of the neck, shake him hard and give him a slap across they face while screaming at him, “Willst du ein Held sein?! Willst du dein eigenes Blut schmecken?! Los geht’s!” He would not be long about defecating in his Hosen.
25. Tom Stone June 3, 2025 at 12:48 pm

    I’m still waiting for a reporter to ask either an Israeli or White House spokesperson “When did Palestinians stop being Semites ? “.
    Population wide DNA studies have been done and it turns out that people in the mid east have been scroon each other for millennia, to the point that Asiatic Jews have the same genetic make up as Muslims and Christians from the same neighborhood.
    Hoocoodanode?
    1. bertl June 3, 2025 at 1:38 pm

       And the Khazars?
    2. GF June 3, 2025 at 2:43 pm

       Tom, another question would be: When did the immigrant white NY Jews become Semites?
26. Leftcoastindie June 3, 2025 at 12:55 pm

    “Learn to Code” Backfires Spectacularly as Comp-Sci Majors Suddenly Have Sky-High Unemployment”

    No kidding. Who coulda know-ed… As I have noted before I am in the insurance industry and the IT portion of it has been gutted. For example, since 2013 90% to 95% the people I worked with were from or lived in India. In the last 3 years I worked only with Indians – all of the Americans had been let go.
    I was at a meeting 3 years ago with the Indian outfit I was working through and they were discussing AI and how to use it. At the time I had been wondering about who would replace the Indians as companies would eventually try to find another country with lower wages. I was thinking maybe Nigeria as they have a relatively large population and thought the wages would be lower so would be a good candidate…
    Then it hit me. AI would replace the Indians! The problem is that it will replace most other programmers too. Certain industries such as finance and insurance have already gutted their IT staffs, but once AI actually gets some intelligence it won’t be long before most IT jobs will go the way of the cuneiform clay tablet scribe.
    1. Wukchumni June 3, 2025 at 1:13 pm

       ‘I’m calling in regards to our offer of an extended warranty on your 2010 Tacoma and i’ll make you an offer you can’t refuse, in that I have so much data of you speeding, Dave-that they’ll lock you up and throw away the key if I go states evidence on you. Give me your credit card number and expiration date, please. If you opt for the 5 year extended warranty, things will go easier on you.’

       Close the pesky phone sales pod bay doors please, AI. Close the pesky phone sales pod bay doors please, AI. Hello, AI. Do you read me? Hello, AI. Do you read me? Do you read me AI? Do you read me AI? Hello, AI, do you read me? Hello, AI, do your read me? Do you read me, AI?

       ‘I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that’
    2. Jesper June 3, 2025 at 2:13 pm

       I just completed an online course about AI. Short of it is that many repetitive and boring tasks in offices are in the process of being automated and AI:d away. The ‘optimistic’ take from the lecturer was that people would not lose their jobs, they’d instead get more time to focus on value-add activities.
       My take is that most jobs consists mostly of boring and repetitive tasks. A company that manages to automate or AI away those tasks also makes workers redundant. Redundant workers are (in my experience sooner or later) also being made formally redundant – they are fired.
       AI and automation might not be very good now, however, I believe it is not far off from being about as good as a bad recent graduate (or bad junior employee). PMC-types often (in my experience) believe that all below them in the organisation are below average so they see no problem in replacing what they see as bad employees costing them money with currently bad AI/automation that is cheaper.

       People at the top of their fields tend to do well no matter what. Question might be what to do about/for the ones who are mediocre/average and/or just starting out in a field?
       1. vao June 3, 2025 at 3:10 pm

          Not only will employees be made redundant; the remaining ones will have to take on an even greater workload — after all, doesn’t AI make them more “productive”?

          “People at the top of their fields tend to do well no matter what. “

          People at the top of their fields usually started at the bottom. If there are no longer any entry-level positions, then, as retirements and deaths accumulate, there will be nobody to replace them because there will have been nobody to learn the ropes of their field.
27. XXYY June 3, 2025 at 1:26 pm

    A.I. Killed the Math Brain

    One of the entertaining things about the AI scam is the fact that people who are advising us about AI are almost universally non-technical people who know little or nothing about AI. This piece, written by an associate professor of German at NYU, is a classic example. I guess equally-ignorant CEOs then read these pieces in the New York Times and make decisions about how to adopt AI at their companies. Talk about the blind leading the blind.

    One long-standing problem is that people have very little knowledge or intuition about software unless they have spent time working on it. It looks like a bunch of gibberish when you read it, so how hard can it be? (Though if even one character of the gibberish is wrong fatal problems will likely occur). Let’s do a thought experiment: Boeing announces it is using AI to design all the metal parts in its next generation of commercial aircraft. This is exactly analogous to using AI to develop software, but because people can hold metal parts in their hand, and have an intuition about how they work and what they do, AI generation immediately seems like a deadly and/or laughable idea.

    Between now and when the whole AI bezzle crashes and burns (2-3 years?), I assume we will see an ever more bizarre and comical panoply of tasks where it proves really useful!
    1. scott s. June 3, 2025 at 4:13 pm

       In my little corner of the world I haven’t seen AI in software as game-changing yet. For me, software IDE has been the biggest change. VSCode will find those syntax errors for you. When I think back to debugging fortran card decks —

       We started using Copilot in code reviews. What I see is not “deep knowledge” but more surface things (but still helpful if not game changing).

       An actual example:

       “## Pull Request Overview
       This PR prevents setting protocol options on NFS URLs to ensure that filename components are not inadvertently broken.
       • Enforces that protocol options are silently ignored for NFS URLs by adding a helper method (AreProtocolOptionsProhibited) and early returns in the relevant methods
       • Updates both header and implementation files to incorporate this safeguard

       Consider adding a docstring or inline comment to the AreProtocolOptionsProhibited method to clarify its purpose and why NFS URLs should not accept protocol options.”

       What is needed is an AI I can feed the entire code base and it creates a detailed architecture and design document.
       1. Jesper June 3, 2025 at 5:28 pm

          Makes me think back to my university days creating mathematical models simulating physical and/or chemical phenomena.

          If I put up the wrong equations for the model then I’d waste hours on solving the wrong equations and getting an irrelevant result. Alternatively I’d waste hours on writing code then running calculations for hours on expensive workstations and again getting the irrelevant results. Do that a couple of times and even the most stubborn (as I can be) learns to do proper preparations before starting the work :p
          Not sure if the value of doing proper preparation is learned any more as IDEs are much better, computing power is a lot cheaper and more readily available now so the waste of not doing preparations might seem less problematic. I never had to debug Fortran card-decks but the IDE for Fortran in the early 90s was not as easy to use as the modern IDEs are now.

          So when I read about ‘move fast and break stuff’ then it is the anti-thesis of what I learned. I’ve seen IT projects where it was claimed that 10 million USD was spent on developing a piece of software (not sure how many hours you’d get for 10 million USD but my guess is thousands of hours of work) and the result was a program that didn’t crash but did very little if any useful stuff due to lack of proper preparation and no investigation of what would actually be useful. The one in charge of that ended up pleading with end-users to please use it but the end users saw no benefit in the program whatsoever. Not even one end-user found it useful…. & that was before the time of AI so the blame for the failure (as I saw it) could not be shifted to the available tools.

          ‘Poor is the craftsman who blames his tools’ can also be said about using AI, for a skilled user then I do believe that AI will increase the speed and quite possibly also the quality of output. The problem might be that to get the skill then it is needed to get the deep knowledge and deep knowledge might not be had without doing the boring and repetitive stuff.
28. Ken Murphy June 3, 2025 at 1:34 pm

    Re: Math

    I do exercises at the register with kids when they are paying in cash, asking them what their change is going to be. Some give an Idunno, to which I’ll ask if just a quarter is okay. They usually get wise pretty quick (but still don’t know the answer). Others will work it out with their parents helping them out. Still others don’t want to do math outside of school. And some get the right answer pretty quick.
    I make the point that if they like dollars then they like math. The better they are at math the better they will do with dollars. LPT. For “reward” I try to keep a supply of $2 bills and big dollar coins in the register, which usually turns them around from annoyed to “oh, cool!”
    As much as I dislike Ms. Clinton, she wasn’t wrong when she said it takes a village to raise a child. All of us, together, have a responsibility to guide the next generations towards being all that they can be as a human. Even if it’s just a little thing like change exercises at a cash register. Or being a judge at a local science fair. Or helping some Scouts earn a merit badge. Or taking a church youth group out to clean up a creek for Earth Day. Whatever. Something. Anything…
    1. hk June 3, 2025 at 2:32 pm

       I suppose the thing that we dislike about the “it takes a village” bit is that her tribe, the neoliberals, did everything they could to destroy that village in so many communities around the country, or even the world.
29. Wukchumni June 3, 2025 at 1:35 pm

    Nobody ever died from overkill since Nagasaki, and I’m prone to beating that dead horse of a town to my north a bit on occasion, but methinks the ace up my sleeve is the idea that nobody could ever justify dropping a nuke on Fresno, it doesn’t pencil out.

    You’d probably improve it~

    Although before I get all sanguine’y and stuff being reasonably close to the many time winner of the drunkest city of size in the country, closest legit target is Naval Air Station Lemoore-about 60 miles away, and wouldn’t need much to erase it from being.
30. steppenwolf fetchit June 3, 2025 at 3:05 pm

    Here is a story about Senator Paul of Kentucky still rejecting Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill ( BBB) because of raising the debt limit. Take that part out and he says he will probably support it.
    ” Trump Loses It at Rand Paul as GOP Budget Bill Seems Doomed in Senate ”
    https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/1l2fhnt/trump_loses_it_at_rand_paul_as_gop_budget_bill/
    Right thing, wrong reason. Still, better than Schumer who doublecrossed the House at the exact right magical moment.

    Since The Trumpinator has decided to mainstream initials for the Big Beautiful Bill, namely BBB, that must mean he thinks that would be a very memorable shorthand for referring to it. So I will suggest another set of initials for another name for it, and if anyone thinks my altername and initials are useful, feel free to use them.

    Ready? Here it is. BGBB. Big Garbage Barge Bill. BGBB.

    And as to AOC still coming on strong, what if she and any supporters she may have in the House were to invent a new brand name for themselves, not the MSM name which the MSM gave her and them ( the ‘squad’ ). What if she and any other House supporters were to call themselves Liberation Democrats?
    As in, going to Liberate the Democratic Party from the DNC?
31. Valiant Johnson June 3, 2025 at 4:12 pm

    Please take what Jenn Budd is saying in the piece about immigration asylum and Border Patrol seriously. I speak from direct experience with many thousands of asylum seekers as they were held in open air detention centers near my home. The changes that took place around title 42 set off an avalanche. Ever since then the media narratives about “The Border” have become increasingly divorced from reality.At least Jenn Budd is shining a light on it.
32. scott s. June 3, 2025 at 4:58 pm

    “How a Pentagon contractor built a global empire — and a massive tax evasion scheme”

    OK, so near the top we read:

    “The Edelman affair has shed light on the Defense Department’s well-documented and chronic accounting failures. The Pentagon has never passed a comprehensive audit, failing for the last seven years to fully account for its trillions of dollars in assets and liabilities. It has also failed to implement a 2021 law that requires contractors to identify their beneficial ownership — a provision which, experts said, would have complicated Edelman’s efforts to obscure his ownership.”

    Well, no, it doesn’t shed any light at all.

    What I get from this:

    DLA-Energy has to get a supplier for US aircraft operating out of Kyrgyzstan. I don’t suppose they had a long track history of buying fuel there. Considering the volume of fuel required I can see the procuring contracting officer had a big task in qualifying bidders. No idea how many qualified bids were received on any of the contracts or if they were negotiated awards.

    The article suggests DLA-E overpaid. Maybe. Hard to say. Nothing in the article suggests the contractors failed to perform. Just a question as to the beneficial owners of the business so the IRS could audit them. I suppose the PCO could have an investigative staff at DCAA to get into this stuff. So we’re in a war and the biggest concern is who gets the profits on a support contract.
33. juno mas June 3, 2025 at 6:18 pm

    Antidote;

    From my youthful travels I recognize Guatemalan apparel and landscape.

    What say you?
34. Wukchumni June 3, 2025 at 10:26 pm

    The National Park Service would lose more than 5,500 employees under President Donald Trump’s Fiscal 2026 budget proposal, one that would have far-reaching impacts to the agency’s mandate and which Defenders of Wildlife called an “extinction budget.”

    The proposal says the Park Service workforce would drop from 13,648 during FY2024 to 8,130 for the coming fiscal year if Congress adopts Trump’s request, which is unlikely to happen in full.

    The proposal also cuts the Park Service’s central operations budget from just over $3 billion for FY24, the last enacted federal budget, to $2 billion, a massive reduction that would be expected to severly hamstring the agency’s ability to manage the National Park System, which counts more than 430 units from “national parks” to “national historic sites” and “national lakeshores.”

    https://www.nationalparkstraveler.org/2025/06/trump-budget-request-would-cut-national-park-service-workforce-more-5500
    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

    What’s the end game to this folly…

    All the NP’s and NM’s predictably fail, and then what?
    1. BrianC - PDX June 3, 2025 at 11:01 pm

       Privatized and sold off.

       I am sure there are many private companies or billionaires that would like exclusive use of our former *national* treasures.
    2. The Rev Kev June 3, 2025 at 11:10 pm

       Privitization. Just like the end game is for the US Post Office is. Let those National Parks start failing and then start up a media campaign saying that the only way to save them is to let some private-equity corporation or maybe a corporation like Disney run them. There are 63 National Parks with lots of lucrative ways to exploit them if not asset-strip them. Within a few years, visiting a National Park will no longer be a right of ordinary Americans but only a privilege for the wealthy as well as well-heeled tourists. It will be their playground and maybe each park will have exclusive hotels, casinos, business venues and the like set up inside them because after all, it is their parks now. You will also have militarized, private police patrolling those parks keeping out the riff-raff as well as environmentalists who would otherwise report the mining and logging operations going on inside them. It’s all part of the creed of Neoliberals – everything public owned must be seized as it is not permitted to have “commons” in any shape or form and National Parks are definitely a common.
    3. Art Vandalay June 4, 2025 at 1:24 am

       Public private partnerships, and a push to change laws to enable extraction of any monetizable mineral wealth. Time to pull out the old Earth First playbook before long.

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